1995 Zapatista Crisis

With President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's economic and political reforms, the NAFTA agreement, Mexico was getting propelled as an important player in the world economy. When an unsolved ethnic situation was brewing in the Mexican county, that is when the Zapatistas uprising happened. The Mexican Government started immediate peace talks. In the early days of the new government administration, President Zedillo took a series of erratic decisions that completely broke with the previous administration's agreements and with his own action plan previously defined.

The previous months to the Zedillo presidential inauguration, a wave of politically motivated assassinations occurred in Mexico. Personalities such as Cardenal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo; front runner Presidential Candidate Colosio that Zedillo replaced as the PRI candidate for the election; José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, brother in law of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and PRI Secretary General, etc., were targeted. So with the purpose to give credibility to the investigations of these political crimes and to grant a healthy distance, President Zedillo appointed a member of the opposition political party PAN, Antonio Lozano Gracia, as Attorney General. With the purpose of promoting a different political Agenda, during the new Attorney General's commission the Law Procedures were used as a systematic opposition to Due Process and Justice. This caused serious problems to President Zedillo's Interior Government, originating amongst other crises the 1995 Zapatista Crisis.

On January 5 of 1995 the Secretary of Interior Esteban Moctezuma started a secret meeting process with Subcomandante Marcos called "Steps Toward Peace" They took place in the village of Guadalupe Tepeyac, belonging to the municipality of Pantelho, Chiapas. Important specific agreements that both parties agreed to comply where reached. In which the Mexican army withdraw of certain points, such as San Andres Larrainzar and Marcos accepted that a group of citizens to be involved in a formal negotiation to start in a couple of weeks. Due to the fast progress of the negotiations in the steps toward peace, the possibility of an agreement looked very close and thus Marcos wrote “I am being threatened by 'unemployment“. » »

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